Bookslut

January 2011

We see over and over love meeting pain, silence meeting silence, silence meeting nothing at all. I have been pondering how and why people come together, and how and why they do not. I’ve been thinking about what came before time, and what’s above us, and what’s below us, and what might come next. I’ve been thinking about how it all relates to poetry.
by
Elizabeth Bachner

By the time Kapil gets to “I,” you’ve already entered the scene as your own “I” -- and so there is little difference from thereon. And when this realization takes place, you’re knee-deep in the frames and the forms -- and you are a hybrid creature in an underworld.
by
Olivia Cronk

"I like to think of a book of poems as a terrain that the reader will be navigating, and I want that terrain to be varied. As a driver you don’t want to have to be in four-wheel drive all day long, busting through mud holes, and yet you don’t want to be out on the freeway all day long either, with the cruise control on, maybe listening to Barbra Streisand. I want the terrain to change, and to offer the reader various footholds, places to breathe. At least that’s the kind of book I would want to read."
by
Andrew James Weatherhead

Mann is ruthless. There is no holiness in death, for him, no sanctity. His narrative voice mocks everyone: Hans Castorp, who is engaging in this quixotic, solipsistic errand. Joachim, his cousin, who is silent and accepting of it all. And the dying men and women (and children), themselves, who are often ridiculous, or stupid, or both.
by
Pauls Toutonghi

"Almost everything I write feels to me to be really grounded in being a woman and being around women. I am looking to record experience, for altruistic purposes. I don’t really mind at all if a man can pick up this book and feel connected to it in a way that is not gender specific. I mean, that's fucking fantastic. But that was never intended. I want the reader to know I’m a woman, and that these are things that women can feel, but not exclusively so."
by
Noah Cicero

Vargas Llosa may have told his audience in Stockholm that he doesn’t want a fate like Gabo's -- that is, to be a “statue” -- but it is too late. His now-solidified literary stardom combined with his outspokenness have quickly transformed him into a stateless statesman.
by
Jesse Tangen-Mills

"And although prose poetry is often discussed in terms of its subversive origin, a primary point of this hybrid is its purposeful distinction from any origin. Sure, there are purists who regard the prose in prose poetry as pejorative, like a poem wearing a cheap prose wig and hollering, look at me! I am a poem without line breaks! I hate white space! But what it comes down to for me, most times, is very simply a feeling: an undeniable poetic underpinning in a work of prose."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth

"All of the stories surprise me, to one degree or another. I always start with a single line so I have no idea what will happen after that. It's probably best this way as I lack imagination. ... Every story, when it finally comes together, feels like a little miracle."
by
Catherine Lacey